Spade exposes Wilmer as a concealed, armed threat and takes his pistols before they reach Casper Gutman’s suite at the Alexandria Hotel. Later, when Wilmer tries to raise a pistol during Spade’s proposal to make him the fall guy, Gutman and Joel Cairo restrain him and Spade knocks him down and secures another weapon. The two moments turn Wilmer from a watcher and conspirator into a disarmed captive whose proposed role in the case is shaped by Spade’s tactical control and the group’s need for a defensible account of the crimes.

The threat in the corridor

At the Alexandria Hotel, Spade and Wilmer ride to the twelfth floor and head along the corridor toward Gutman’s suite. Spade deliberately falls about a foot and a half behind Wilmer as they near the door. He then grabs Wilmer from behind, forcing the boy’s arms forward while Wilmer’s hands remain inside his overcoat pockets. The maneuver brings the coat up and reveals that Spade has caught him with both arms controlled, before Wilmer can use what he is carrying.

Wilmer struggles, kicks backward, and tries to wrench free, but Spade’s grip prevents him from doing so. Spade lifts him from the floor and brings him down again, then shifts his hold until he has Wilmer’s wrists and hands under control. After a tense pause, Wilmer’s arms go limp. Spade withdraws a heavy automatic pistol from each of the overcoat pockets, takes both weapons, and puts them in his own pockets. Wilmer faces him with a blank expression and says nothing. Spade’s derisive grin and invitation to continue to the suite make the disarming part of a larger plan: he means to present Wilmer to his employer, not simply to end the encounter in the corridor.

A reconstruction, not yet proof

The case surrounding Wilmer is bound up with a separate death and the movement of a particular weapon. At the alley where Miles Archer is found, the top rail of a fence has been torn away, and Archer lies on a slope below it, caught near a boulder. Spade reconstructs a possible shooting: the gunman stood near the fence with Archer’s back to it; the shot sent Archer backward through the broken rail and down the slope. Tom Polhaus confirms the outline and notes that the blast burned Archer’s coat. The physical scene gives Spade a sequence to test, but a reconstruction is not, by itself, identification of the shooter.

Later, Tom says the Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver belonged to Floyd Thursby and that the slug in Archer came from it. A bellhop at Thursby’s hotel had seen the unusual revolver in Thursby’s room that morning, Tom explains, and the police have matched its bullet to the one that killed Archer. These details strongly connect Thursby’s weapon to the shooting. They do not establish, on the evidence recounted here, that Wilmer fired it. The distinction between a weapon’s provenance, a bullet match, and the identity of the person who pulled the trigger remains important as the characters try to turn a complicated chain of events into a prosecutable case.

The proposed fall guy

The second confrontation unfolds later, during Spade’s discussion with Gutman about how to handle the people involved in the falcon affair. Spade argues that District Attorney Bryan would prefer a clear case against one defendant to a sprawling prosecution that risks confusing a jury. In Spade’s account, a single, convincing conviction could lead the prosecutor to overlook equally guilty accomplices; the falcon itself could be dismissed as a distraction if its story made the case harder to prove. Spade presents this not as a complete account of justice, but as a calculation about prosecutorial incentives and the evidence that can be made to fit them.

When Spade begins to explain his proposal, Wilmer cries out and jerks a pistol up in front of his chest. Gutman catches his wrist and forces the gun down; Cairo grabs Wilmer’s other arm. While both men hold him, Spade moves in and strikes Wilmer twice. Cairo releases him, and Spade pushes Cairo away when he attacks in response. Spade then checks Wilmer, carries him to the sofa, and finds a second pistol in his clothes. With the weapons gathered, he announces to Gutman, “Well, there’s our fall-guy.” The remark gives the earlier corridor disarming a new consequence: Wilmer is not merely someone Spade has caught carrying guns, but the man Spade intends to place at the center of the story offered to the authorities.

Meaning and limits of the maneuver

Wilmer’s two attempts to resist Spade’s control bookend the shift in his position. In the corridor, Spade catches him before he can use the pistols and takes them without attracting attention in the quiet hotel passage. Later, in the suite, Wilmer makes his weapon visible and is restrained by the very men whose interests Spade is negotiating. Spade’s second intervention leaves Wilmer unconscious, disarmed, and available as the proposed defendant. The changing circumstances make the episode more than a display of strength: each seizure of a weapon alters who can act and who can be made to bear responsibility.

The fall-guy strategy also exposes the gap between establishing facts and constructing a case. The broken fence, the bullet, and the revolver support parts of a causal account of Archer’s death; they do not automatically settle every question of participation in the wider crimes. Spade’s proposal depends on how Bryan might treat conflicting evidence, not merely on what the evidence proves. By linking Wilmer’s physical disarmament with the effort to narrow the prosecution, the episode shows Spade exercising control over both the immediate danger and the version of events that he expects the law to accept.